John Locke and Parliament

Please note our Canadian shopping cart is down as we transition to UTP Distribution. While purchases cannot be made through our website at this time, you can find many of our titles at your local bookstore!

A new interpretation of confederation contends that the founding fathers were John Locke's disciples - champions of universal human rights and popular sovereignty.Winner - John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History (2009)

Convinced that rights are inalienable and that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed, the Fathers of Confederation - whether liberal or conservative - looked to the European enlightenment and John Locke. Janet Ajzenstat analyzes the legislative debates in the colonial parliaments and the Constitution Act (1867) in a provocative reinterpretation of Canadian political history from 1864 to 1873.

Ajzenstat contends that the debt to Locke is most evident in the debates on the making of Canada's Parliament: though the anti-confederates maintained that the existing provincial parliaments offered superior protection for individual rights, the confederates insisted that the union's general legislature, the Parliament of Canada, would prove equal to the task and that the promise of "life and liberty" would bring the scattered populations of British North America together as a free nation.

"Ajzenstat's body of work has shown the absolute necessity of returning to, and taking seriously, the words and deeds of the central figures of the founding period. Unless one does this, one cannot write responsibly about their thought and achievements. And when one does take them seriously, as Ajzenstat has done, the results are often surprising." Rainer Knopff, political science, University of Calgary"This convincing study of the Canadian founding advances understanding of the influence of Locke while restoring understanding of the Canadian rights tradition." Filippo Sabetti, political science, McGill University" [Ajzenstat] offers a wonderfully Lockean reading of the British North American Act - in the Sovietspeak of cultural constitutionalism now rendered as the Constitution Act of 1867 - that both inspires and lays fully and finally to rest constitutional collectivism and its illiberal cultural identity." The Canadian Historical Review

PART ONE: CONFEDERATION1 Making Parliament 32 Popular Sovereignty in the Confederation Debates 223 Human Rights in 1867 494 Civic Identity 675 The Political Nationality 88

PART TWO: WHAT WENT BEFORE? WHAT I S HAPPENING NOW?6 Celebrating 1791: Two Hundred Years of Representative Government 1137 Canada’s First Constitution: Pierre Bédard on Tolerance and Dissent 1248 Modern Mixed Government: A Liberal Defence of Inequality 1459 Collectivity and Individual Rights in “Mainstream Liberalism”: John Arthur Roebuck and the Patriotes 16310 Parliament and Today’s Discontent 180